Hours before dawn on the morning of 7 May 1945, a cluster of
correspondents and press and newsreel photographers waited at one
end of the G-3 war room at SHAEF forward headquarters in Reims. In
the center of the room stood a large, empty table. At 0230, ten
Allied officers entered and took seats around three sides of the
table. Generals Smith and Morgan headed three-officer U.S. and
British delegations; Gen. Francois Sevez represented France; and
Maj. Gen. Ivan Souslaparov, a colonel, and a lieutenant were the
Soviet contingent. When all were seated, Morgan called in the
Germans, Generaloberst Alfred Jodl and two others. They entered,
clicked their heels, and gave small military lows. At the table
nobody moved except Smith, who waved the Germans to seats on the
unoccupied side of the table where they sat facing a large wall
snap showing the Allied forces' latest dispositions. Maj. Gen.
Kenneth W. D. Strong, SHAEF-2, acting as interpreter, stood behind
the Germans and read out the surrender terms, more for the benefit
of the press than for the Germans, who were familiar enough with
them already. After Strong finished, Jodl rose and declared, in the
name of the German Army, Navy, and Air Force, that he surrendered
unconditionally. The document was then signed, and Jodl and his
party left the room.1

SHAEF's wartime mission was completed, but with a last-minute
twist. What the Germans signed at Reims was the "Act of Military
Surrender," written three days before in the SHAEF G-3, not the
painstakingly negotiated EAC surrender instrument. The chief author
of the surrender document signed at Reims was a British colonel,
John Counsell, an actor and theatrical manager in civilian life,
who had cheerfully "cribbed" much of it from the terms for the
German surrender in Italy (2 May) published in Stars and Stripes.
2Its six short paragraphs -none more than two sentences
long- simply affirmed the German High Command's unconditional
surrender, to take effect fifty-nine minutes before midnight on 8
May.3

SHAEF had included the EAC surrender instrument in the
ECLIPSE
plans and had assumed it was the document the Germans would sign if
they signed one at all, which by the time jodl arrived had begun
to seem unlikely. The EAC was by then at work on an Allied
proclamation of the German defeat, and nothing had been done to
clear up several deficiencies in the surrender instrument that had
developed since it was approved by the governments. One slipup was
that, although SHAEF had received copies of the sur-

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render instrument, none had been sent officially through its
channel of command, the CCS. When Winant tried to correct this
omission on 4 May, he ran into another complication. At Yalta,
Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had added a single word,
"dismemberment," to the rights the victorious powers reserved for
themselves with regard to Germany. The change had not been
communicated to the French.4 Finally, the surrender instrument
required the signature of the "highest German civilian authority"
as well as the highest military authority. Hitler had killed
himself on 30 April. Grossadmiral Karl Doenitz had announced
himself as Hitler's appointed successor two days later and had
initiated the negotiations for the surrender; but the Allies did
not recognize him as head of state, and his authority, except
possibly over the armed forces still fighting, was doubtful.
Berlin, the capital, had fallen to the Russians on 2 May, and
nearly all the rest of Germany was already occupied by one or the
other of the Allies. When Winant talked to Smith on the 6th, Winant
agreed that the Act of Military Surrender would accomplish the
purpose with the "least controversy and delay." At his request,
Smith had included in the short document a sentence obligating the
Germans to accept the EAC terms as well, if they were imposed.5

SHAEF had sent drafts of the Act of Military Surrender to
Washington, London, and Moscow on 6 May and received reactions from
Churchill and Winant before the signing but not from Washington or Moscow.6 Moscow's response reached Reims on the morning of 7
May, six hours after the Germans had signed. It practically accused
Eisenhower of making a truce with the Germans that would allow them
to continue the war against the Soviet Union; and it insisted-too
late by then-that there be only one signing and that in Berlin.
SHAEF had proposed signing first at Reims and later at Berlin to
save time and lives.7

The second signing was held, amidst obvious evidence of Soviet
pique, in Berlin shortly before midnight on the 8th. Excepting
perhaps the Germans, the least happy man of those who had been
present during the surrender at Reims was General Souslaparov. He
was recalled to Moscow on the same day. Colonel Counsell saw him
leave the SHAEF senior officers' mess after he received the
order-"an old man, sagging at the knees, his face drained of all
color, his eyes expressionless."
8

President Truman and Prime Minister Churchill announced the
surrender on 8 May. The Soviet government withheld its announcement
until early on the 9th, after the ceremony in Berlin. In Germany,
the troops and displaced persons had vented

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their enthusiasm in a premature celebration on the night of the
5th; the Germans themselves had little to celebrate. The military
government detachments noted the occasion in forms similar to the
following entry from the journal of HIA2, Saarbruecken:

8 May Tuesday
0700 first call; 0730 breakfast; 0830 officers' call. Lt. Larsen to cover property
control duties and received what information lie could from Mr. Leathart. Lt.
Vogel sent Preble to Friedrichsthal on procurement for 1282d Engineer Construction
Battalion. Lt. Harris investigated complaints of looting on the part of DPs,
German civilians, and French and U.S. troops; investigated the escape of a Russian
prisoner from the DP hospital. Lt. West checked warehouses for chloride of lime
needed for sanitary purposes in DP camps. Capt. Young investigated the agricultural
situation in Saarlautern Landkreis. Capt. Laid conferred with local industrial
leaders. Churchill spoke over the radio and declared the war in Europe is over.
In Saarbruecken, it was just another day, with the German people going about
their business as usual. Cpl. Pfluger celebrated by shooting himself in the
heel and was hospitalized.9

As far as the Americans could tell, the emotional impact on the
Germans was slight. Their faith in victory had been undermined by
the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943 and shattered by the Normandy
landing. Few had retained any real hope for a German victory after
the Allied forces reached the western border. In contrast to the
reaction after the Armistice in 1918, they clearly recognized the
fact of a complete military defeat. On the other hand, SHAEF's
Psychological Warfare Division, during interrogations after V-E
Day, found a pervasive tendency among the Germans to disclaim
personal responsibility for the disaster. They retreated to an
intense preoccupation with purely private affairs, resorted to the argument of the "Kleiner
Mann" (the little man), and endlessly repeated the phrase "belogen
und betrogen" (lied to and deceived).10

After the surrender was signed, the remaining question for the
Allies to decide was what, exactly, had been accomplished. The
General Board concluded later that the German state was
extinguished at Reims and the victors acquired sovereignty over the
German people. It cited Grotius, who defined unconditional
surrender as "pure surrender . . . which makes the one who
surrenders a subject and confers the sovereign power on him to whom
the surrender is made."
11Immediately after V-E Day, Eisenhower was
not so certain. The Act of Military Surrender had procured the
submission of the German armed forces but not necessarily of the
German government, which was just the opposite of what had happened
in 1918 when the civilians had signed the Armistice and the
military had not. Neither did the Act of Military Surrender provide
for Allied assumption of supreme authority in Germany. Also missing
was authority to exclude the surrendered German forces from the
prisoner of war provisions of the Hague and Geneva Conventions.12The EAC; was aware of these omissions, too, and on 12 Nay submitted
to the governments a draft "Declaration Regarding the Defeat of
Germany and the Assumption of Supreme Authority by the Allied
Powers" that combined the essentials of the Act of Military
Surrender,

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the EAC surrender instrument, and the
proclamation of the German defeat that the EAC had worked on just
before the surrender. When the governments approved, the
declaration was to be issued over the signatures of the commanders
in chief in Germany.13

The third sentence in the EAC declaration read, "There is no
central Government or authority in Germany capable of accepting
responsibility for the maintenance of order, the administration of
the country, and compliance with the requirements of the victorious
Powers."
14 This statement was not yet quite accurate. On the Flensburg Fiord, close to the Danish border, in a former navy
torpedo school at Muerwick, Admiral Doenitz held a potentially
arguable claim to the headship of the German state. In a political
testament, written on the night before his death, Hitler had
conferred on Doenitz the presidential powers under the Weimar
Constitution that Hitler himself had assumed in 1934 after
Hindenburg died. Doenitz had not received the testament, but he had
authenticated transcripts of radio messages from Berlin informing
him of the appointment, and he had begun preparing a "white book"
to defend his claims.15 In negotiating the surrender, SHAEF had
studiedly ignored Doenitz while at the same time dealing with him, indirectly at
least, and tolerating his government's existence.

Doenitz had surrendered northern Germany, including
Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark, on 5 May, thus making himself and
his people virtual prisoners of Montgomery's 21 Army Group;
however, from a little island of territory around Flensburg and
Muerwik, Doenitz continued to conduct governmental and military
affairs, as far as he was still able, up until the general
cease-fire and for some days thereafter. The Soviet General Staff
protested acidly SHAEF's having permitted the German negotiators at
Reims to use terminology such as "new government" and "German
Government" in their messages to Doenitz because, the Russians
said, they preferred to "do business with the German High Command
and not with the German Government, which in actuality does not
exist."
16 The Russians, however, who had been the first to learn
about Hitler's death and the testament, had at one point offered to
allow Doenitz to assemble his government in Berlin.

After V-E Day, the small area around Flensburg-Muerwik became an
enclave in the otherwise totally occupied country. Armed German
soldiers marched in the streets and stood guard outside the offices
and residences of the members of the government. The Reich's war
flag still flew over Doenitz's headquarters, and Allied officers
who had business there avoided appearing to give orders. As a
government, Doenitz and his associates lacked nearly all the
essentials, above all, contact with the people they proposed to
govern. Albert Speer, Hitler's armament and munitions minister

[260]

AN ERA PASSES as Germans exchange street signs.

who had become Doenitz's minister of economics and production,
proposed that they close up shop completely after the surrender was
signed to escape becoming a laughing stock; but Doenitz and the
others believed that they represented at least the continuity of
the Reich.

The one resource Doenitz had in plentiful supply was executive
talent-though not often the kind that was likely to find Allied
acceptance. Like Speer, many others from the upper and middle
reaches of the Nazi governmental hierarchy had made their way to
the Flensburg Fiord. From among the less tainted, Doenitz found enough men to assemble a complete, even elaborate, cabinet of
experts, all suffering from the same disability however: the
organizations they had headed were smashed and the records and
people scattered all over Germany.17When the British troops
surrounding the enclave did not move in to arrest them after the
surrender, a wild hope sprang up that maybe they could survive by
making themselves indispensable to the Allies. Doenitz put the
specialists to

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work writing proposals, and Jodl began to talk about
"overwhelming" the Allies with memoranda, letting them "break their
teeth off" on the big problems, and eventually playing the Russians
and the Western Allies off against each other.18On an emotional
binge, the cabinet met every day to work on polishing its own
organization; it even acquired an official photographer. Doenitz
took to riding the five hundred yards between his quarters and his
office in one of Hitler's big Mercedes limousines that had turned
up in Flensburg.19

On the morning of 12 May, Maj. Gen. Lowell W. Rooks arrived at
the OKW (Oberkommandoder Wehrmacht, High Command of the Armed
Forces) in Flensburg at the head of
the SHAEF Control Party with orders "to impose the SCAEF's
will on the German High Command."
20After taking up quarters
for himself and his party aboard the Patria, a passenger ship
docked in the harbor not far from the torpedo school, Rooks called in
Doenitz and ordered him to arrest General Field Marshall Wilhelm
Keitel, Chief, OKW, and turn him over as a prisoner of war in
reprisal for an alleged failure of some German troops to cease
resistance against the Soviet forces at the specified time.

Despite its ominous beginning, Doenitz considered the meeting
highly encouraging. He believed it constituted a recognition of him
as the head of state.
21Rooks reported only a great desire on the
part of Doenitz and his group to create the impression "that they are the best people to issue orders."
22What Doenitz interpreted as recognition was apparently mostly
uncertainty on the part of Rooks and SHAEF as to what to think of
or do with this strange military-political menage that had drifted
up out of the wreckage of the Third Reich.

Rooks may have had instructions to explore the possibility of
using Doenitz and his people as an instrument of Allied control.23 If so, he did not tarry long over his decision. On the 15th he told
Smith, "It is quite obvious that this headquarters is a rapidly
decaying concern with little knowledge of present events and
practically no work to do." He suggested, subject to the needs of
SHAEF and the army groups, disbanding the OKW as soon as possible.
On the 17th, Rooks, his British deputy, Brig. E. J. Foord, and the
SHAEF Political Adviser, Ambassador Robert D. Murphy, jointly
recommended abolishing "the so-called acting government"
immediately. The next day they questioned Doenitz about the manner
of his appointment, but only to satisfy their curiosity. SHAEF had
already requested Moscow's agreement to the arrest of Doenitz and
the others with him who were in the automatic arrest cate-

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gories and had instructed Rooks to "take all steps short of
arrest" to insure that Doenitz ceased executive functions.24

The Americans were, in a way, more interested in a Soviet OKW
control party, under Maj. Gen. Trusov, who arrived several days
after them, than they were in the Germans. No other element of the
elaborate GOLDCUP and SHAEF Special Echelon organizations had so
far made contact with the Russians. To Murphy, Trusov gave the
impression that the Russians wanted a co-ordinated administration
in Germany but had not yet formed anything like the U.S. and
British Control Council groups.25 Rooks saw in the Russians'
behavior a latent threat to SHAEF's still-cherished
nonfraternization policy. The Russians, he reported, "fraternized
wholeheartedly." The enlisted men talked to German women on the
streets. The crew of the plane that brought the Russians got drunk
with German officers in Flensburg rind ended up kissing them. The
pilot tried to bring back a German woman to the airfield on a
motorcycle. On board the Patria a Soviet officer had been seen
drinking and laughing with three German officers in his cabin.26

On the 19th, the Soviet command having agreed, SHAEF ordered 21
Army Group to arrest the Doenitz government and the OKW. Col. C. W.
Stewart, Jr. , described the arrest as it occurred on the morning
of the 23d:

At 10 A.M., Admiral Doenitz, General Jodl, Admiral von
Friedeburg and three other officers came marching down the dock and
were escorted up to the ship's bar where a long table had been
prepared with chairs on both sides, very much in the same way the
war room in Rheims was arranged. If ever a man with a field
marshall's baton looked unhappy, Doemtz did (after he came out).
Rooks must have taken almost no time to deliver his message. The
Germans were marched off and put into cars to take them home to
pack.

By the time Doenitz emerged from the interview, the main street
of Muerwik was filled with British tanks and with troops rounding
up the Germans. The German barracks were looted, and, Stewart
reported, "the complexion of the town changed overnight from being
optimistic to sullen quiet."
27 Before the day's end, Doenitz,
Speer, Jodl, and the other top war crimes suspects were moved to
ASHCAN. General Admiral Hans Georg von Friedeburg, who had made the
partial surrender to Montgomery and who had been at Reims with Jodl,
at Berlin with Keitel, and finally on the Patria with Doenitz, shot
himself.

Since the unconditional military surrender had already been
accomplished, the most significant passage in the Declaration
Regarding the Defeat of Germany and the Assumption of Supreme
Authority by the Allied Powers was that pertaining to the
assumption of supreme authority. It read as follows

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The Governments of the United States of America,
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United Kingdom, and
the Provisional Government of the French Republic, hereby assume
supreme authority with respect to Germany, including all the powers
possessed by the German Government, the High Command and any state,
municipal, or local government or authority. The assumption, for
the purposes stated above, of the said authority and powers does
not affect the annexation of Germany.
28

The second sentence mitigated the traditional ultimate effect of
unconditional surrender, the permanent extinction of the defeated
state. Under the declaration, however, the German state,
nevertheless, did cease to exist, even if only provisionally. The
law of belligerent occupation also no longer applied to Germany.
The Allied sovereignty was complete, limited only by its own
decision, and the relationship was that of conqueror and subject.
The declaration was written to be issued by the representatives of
the Allied supreme commands on the authority of their governments
and in the interests of the United Nations.

President Truman approved the declaration on 14 May, and the War
Department instructed Eisenhower to arrange to have the four
commanders in Germany issue it.
29McCloy commented that, since one
slipup had already been made, SHAEF should be careful not to make
another and should therefore take no action not approved beforehand
by the four governments.30 The other governments submitted their
formal approval within a week.

In the meantime, however, although the declaration remained a
formality, an almost superfluous statement of a de facto condition, it had
become entangled in a knot of tangential problems. One problem was
that Gousev wanted to add the Soviet-sponsored Polish government as
one of the Allies who would be given advance copies of the
declaration. Seven European Allied governments, including neither
the Polish exile government in London nor the Polish "Lublin"
(later Warsaw) government, had been consulted in writing the
original surrender instrument and would be shown the declaration.
The British wanted to add to this number the Dominions, India, and
Brazil. When Strang raised the question in the EAC on 10 May,
Gousev at once proposed including the Warsaw government, which
neither the United Kingdom nor the United States recognized.31

While the EAC negotiated the Polish question, the Americans and
the British debated some other subjects among themselves. Both
groups assumed, in fact hoped, that the signing of the declaration
would automatically bring the Control Council into being, since the
signatories would also be the members of the Control Council.
Activating the Control Council, however, could force decisions
concerning SHAEF's existence and the SHAEF-held territory in the
Soviet zone-decisions on which opinion was both mixed and
divergent. Eisenhower made a strong case for keeping SHAEF until
the forces were redisposed in their national zones and the Control
Council was operating effectively-which, his staff predicted, would
take at least three months.32The British, who had long de-

[264]

sired SHAEF's early disbandment, opposed prolonging the combined
command formally because existence of the command would logically
require the declaration to be signed only by Eisenhower as Allied
Supreme Commander and Marshal Zhukov as Soviet Supreme Commander.
On the other hand, however, they apparently did not want to see
SHAEF formally disbanded before a decision was made regarding the
SHAEF-held Soviet territory.33

Truman had proposed, in late April, making the troop and
boundary adjustments as soon as a government declared itself ready
to take over its assigned territory. But Churchill had objected
both to "letting the Russians . . . order us back at any point they
might decide" and to "yielding up . . . an enormous territory . . .
while all questions of our spheres in Vienna or arrangements for
the occupation of Berlin remain unsettled." The President and the
Prime Minister had finally agreed to propose setting up the Control
Council first and then redisposing the troops in the zones. Stalin
acknowledged the message but, except for agreeing to a "temporary
tactical demarcation line," ignored the proposal.34

Talking to Eisenhower on 16 May, Churchill indicated that he did not want to
see any decision made on SHAEF's status that would give the Soviet Union an
excuse to press for a withdrawal from its zone; therefore, on the 24th the British
argued in Washington for separating the decisions on SHAEF and the Soviet territory
from the declaration and the activation of the Control Council. They wanted
to make the withdrawal from the Soviet zone in particular, they later explained,
contingent on the settlement of the "whole question of future relations"
between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union in Europe. The State Department
indicated the US government was interested above all in getting the Control
Council established and working and would not delay the withdrawal from the
Soviet zone if the Russians made it an issue but would "defer" the
decisions on SHAEF and the Soviet zone temporarily-presumably at least long
enough to gauge the Soviet reaction.35

In the end it was Eisenhower who brought the matter to a head, though not by
his or the US government's choice. On 29 May, Winant recommended in the EAC
having the commanders in chief meet in Berlin on 1 June, sign the declaration,
form the Control Council, and put the protocols on zones and control machinery
into force. The EAC had by then solved the Polish question. It would transmit
the declaration to the original seven Allied governments through its Allied
Consultation Committee, and the British government would give copies separately
to the Dominions and India, the US government to Brazil, and the Soviet government
to Poland. Gousev's instructions from Moscow were slow in coming, but not unusually
slow for the Russians, and on 4 June he reported that his government had accepted
Winant's recommendation and wanted to hold the ceremony in Berlin the next day.36 Eisenhower, meanwhile, had asked on 2 June how he was to respond
in case the Russians raised the question of their zone, as they seemed likely
to do. The JCS told him that the withdrawal from the Soviet zone "should

[265]

not be a question precedent to establishment of
the Control Council." If the Russians raised the point, he was to
say that it was "one of the items to be worked out by the Control
Council."
37

On 3 June, Eisenhower sent to the JCS his proposed agenda for the first meeting
of the Control Council, which he expected would take place after the formal
signing of the declaration. He expected to discuss a location for the Control
Authority, either in Berlin or elsewhere, and, if in Berlin, the questions of
transit and communications to the city. He would talk about moving the US forces
out of the Soviet zone if the Russians brought it up, but he would not make
any commitments without consulting the JCS. If the Russians asked, he would
explain SHAEF's continuing existence as an interim arrangement for the period
in which the US, British, and French forces were being redistributed to their
zones.38

The planes carrying Eisenhower and his party landed at Tempelhof airport in
the late forenoon on the 5th. After reviewing a battalion-size honor guard,
he was taken by car to the southeastern Berlin suburb Wendenschloss, as were
also Montgomery and the French commander in chief in Germany, General Jean de
Lattre de Tassigny, when they arrived-separately, of course, to emphasize their
status as representatives of their respective countries. The drive through Berlin,
along streets lined with Soviet troops and with scarcely any Germans to be seen,
showed the city to be heavily damaged; but in Wendenschloss, wooded and lying
between two lakes, the war had missed the expensive villas, until recently the
property of movie stars and important Nazis. Zhukov lived in one of the villas,
and he assigned one to each of the Western commanders for the day. At a private
meeting, Eisenhower presented Zhukov with the Chief Commander grade of the Legion
of Merit and then returned to his quarters expecting to be called for the signing
ceremony shortly, since the time set, noon, was already past.

Hours passed without anything more being heard from or seen of
the Russians other than the household staffs, who seemed not even
to know what the gathering was for in the first place. Finally,
when Eisenhower and Montgomery threatened to leave without signing,
they and de Lattre were called to the yacht club where the ceremony
was to take place, only to discover when they arrived that the
Russians insisted they could not sign because the wording of
Article 10 of the declaration could be construed as requiring them
to arrest Japanese nationals found in Germany, and they were not at
war with Japan. Eisenhower ordered the passage taken out, which
amazed Zhukov, who had to check with Moscow before accepting the
deletion. By the time the Russians were ready it was approaching
five o'clock, and Eisenhower, who intended to return to Frankfurt
that day before dark, was again becoming impatient.

The signing took only a few minutes. Seated at a large round
table, in a blaze of arc lights and photographers flash bulbs, each
commander in chief signed four copies of the declaration: in
English, French, Russian, and German. When finished, they adjourned
with their interpreters and a few

[266]

MARSHAL ZHUKOV (Center) POURS A TOAST at the 5 June 1945 meeting
in Berlin. General Eisenhower (left) departed immediately after the
toast. On. the right are Field Marshal Montgomery and General de Lattre de Tassigny.

aides for a private talk on the clubhouse porch.39 After a brief
preliminary conversation, Eisenhower, apparently assuming from the EAC's agreement that they now constituted the Control Council,
asked Zhukov whether the control staffs could begin work.40 Zhukov replied that they could not. When Eisenhower
talked about an agenda and schedule for Control Council meetings,
Zhukov said the troops should be established in their proper zones
first because he could not study questions relating to Germany
while he did not con-

[267]

trol his own zone. On remarks by Montgomery about the
difficulties of sorting out the tangle created by the war and
getting the troops into their zones, Zhukov commented blandly that
the war was over and he wanted to know how long the redeployment
would take. When Montgomery estimated three weeks, Zhukov said that
was "very satisfactory"; in the meantime they could gather their
Control Council staffs. Since Eisenhower's and Montgomery's
instructions did not allow them to make commitments on the
withdrawal, the meeting ended with only a decision to refer the
question to the governments.41

The Russians had an elaborate banquet planned, but Eisenhower declined to stay,
the occasion having become a contest in stubbornness on both sides. Shortly
after six o'clock, Eisenhower and his party, which included General Clay and
US Group Control Council personnel who had planned to stay in Berlin, departed.
The Russians had given no sign of being willing to accommodate Clay and his
people in Berlin even overnight.

Summing up his impressions a day later in his report to Washington, Eisenhower
said he believed the Soviet Union would join some form of Control Council and
would allow the Western Allies' troops to take over their zones in Berlin when
the withdrawal from the Soviet zone was accomplished. (Zhukov had said at the
meeting that he had no objection to establishing the Control Authority in Berlin.)
Eisenhower added, however, that the Control Council could possibly "become
only a negotiating agency and in no sense an overall government for Germany."
To prepare for this contingency, he suggested two alternatives: administering
the U.S. zone as an independent economic unit or establishing three-power control
in the western zones and administering them as a unit.
42